ECON5004: Communication in Economics Essay
Whats the bottom line?
You need to write a 1500-word essay intended for an academic audience. The speech has to be built around a main argument that is engaged with credible academic economics literature. The essay project will proceed in 3 phases as part of a cumulative assessment:
(1) a pitch of your main topic,
(2) a first fulldraft of the essay,
(3) final essay submission.
Assignment Outline
Students are required to draft an academic essay over the course of the first 9 weeks of the semester. The paper will be drafted in phases, with opportunities for detailed feedback, revision and improvement at each phase. Since it is not possible to write a full academic paper in 1500 words (and the research required for a full academic paper would exceed the workload requirements for this course), the essays will follow one of the following formats:
- Persuasive essay. Students use academic literature to back up an argument about an issue of economic interest. This could be a public policy issue, a business issue, or a more academic issue. In any case, the essay should be grounded in supporting a particular argument using economic reasoning and supported by credible academic economic literature.
- Literature review. Students can write a review of the literature in a specific topic area. This will need to be more than just a summary of various papers it will need to have acentral thesis (main argument)and cite academic literature to support that argument (most likely, arguing what the main takeaway of the literature is). So, ideally, for this kind of essay the student would identify an area of literature where there is some debate, with multiple papers taking different sides of an issue. The students essay would then argue in support of one side of the debate, citing and acknowledging literature on both sides of the debate, but ultimately coming down in support of one side.
- Research proposal. Students can write a proposal for a specific research project. You can think about this in a number of ways as the narrative section of a research grant, as a proposal that one would write to receive permission to conduct research in a public sector or professional context, or as the proposal for a masters or PhD thesis. If you are choosing this option, please make it clear in your essay (e.g., in the title, or with a quick note just below the title).
Students are encouraged to select an essay format that best fits their personal and professional interests. The topic of their essay should fall under the theme of their tutorial group. The essay uses economic reasoning and evidence to support its main argument, and is based on credible academic literature in economics.
What is credible academic literature in economics? While there is some debate on this, a good starting point would be to draw most reference from academic journals ranked in the top 500 in the world on this listing of journals for IDEAS/RePEc:
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html
and at least a couple recent citations from the top 200 journals. It is not enough just to cite papers from these journals (e.g., as secondary citations), asit is critical that you identify multiple papers from this set of journals that are directly relevant to your main argument(i.e., you should be speaking to an issue that has been debated in such journals). An argument that is so general that it would never be debated by academic economists (e.g., trade affects the economy), even if you can cite papers on trade, is not acceptable. An argument that is so specific it would not be directly debated in academic journals (e.g., something about new goods that are being imported to Sydney) is not acceptable, though its fine to use a specific example as motivation for a broader issue. Given academic publishing lags, it may be hard to find published research on important and current economic issues. For example, theres now a lot of academic literature on the impacts of COVID-19, but less on the post-COVID inflation and recession. If debate on the issue has not yet emerged in the academic literature, such that you can find papers on either side of the debate, then it is not an acceptable topic.
In general the essays will have the following format: short introduction (1 or 2 short paragraphs max), evidence/exposition, short conclusion. The introduction will motivate the central argument (the hook), outline the main aspects of the essay, and argue for the importance of the topic of the essay. The evidence/exposition is the meat of the essay it will bring the students research to bear, in outlining the evidence for the main argument or point of the essay, while the conclusion will succinctly tie up the essay.
